Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Russian Владимир Яковлевич Пропп, scientific transliteration Vladimir Propp Jakovlevic; * 17 Apriljul / April 29 1895greg in Saint Petersburg, .. † August 22, 1970 in Leningrad) was a Russian folklorist German descent. He is considered one of the greatest philologists of the 20th century.

Life

Propp considered the founder of morphological or structuralist Folklore. Between 1914 and 1918 he studied Russian and German philology. Then he taught the German language at universities in Leningrad. From 1938 to 1969 he was Professor of German, Russian literature and folklore at the Leningrad State University.

In 1928 he published his groundbreaking work Morphology of the folktale. The book was published in 1958 in the United States in English, which Propp gave global recognition. 1946, he published The historical roots of magic fairy tale.

Morphology of the folktale

The investigation is a corpus of a hundred Russian fairy tale based, which are compared with respect to their event sequences. Propp notes here that behind the content varying fairy tale comes an unchanging deep structure of the plot revealed. For all studied texts can be doing basic narrative units ( Narrateme ) abstract that identifies Propp as functions. He comes to the conclusion that all he analyzes fairy tales have in common a solid plot structure.

Propp distinguishes 31 invariant functions not need to be fully realized in every fairy tale, in their sequence but are always the same. The 31 functions of the Russian fairy tale magic are grouped into seven thematic circles On a further level of abstraction, which are each associated with a particular actants (eg opponent, helpers, etc.).

Details of Propp's theories and their further development are also discussed under magic tales.

Works

  • Морфология сказки. Leningrad 1928. German edition: Morphology of the folktale. Hanser, Munich 1972. ISBN 3-446-11581-1
  • German edition: The historical roots of magic fairy tale. Hanser, Munich and Vienna in 1987. ISBN 3-446-14363-7
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